In my previous blog (Why is FAST Enterprise Search Important) I discussed why is an Enterprise Search project in import? In this blog posting I will discuss what is needed for a successfully Enterprise Search project. This should hopefully give you enough information to anticipate what will be needed in an Enterprise Search project.

What is an Enterprise Search Project?

A few years ago I had to make the transition as a custom application developer to an application server consultant with Microsoft products. Project plans for implementing SharePoint, K2 or BizTalk were really not much different other than you have several new tasks associated to the configuration, integration, sustainability and maintenance of the new application server. Still with application server projects you still have lots of custom artifacts and components that have to be developed. This too is the case with FAST.

When posed the question of what is an Enterprise Search project, I first did not know where to start. I wanted to draw from my past experience. I also knew that Enterprise Search projects can be complex but I did not understand what a search project would entail.

Content Processing and Transformation

Enterprise Search within an organization many complexities. First we have to be able to index content where ever it may be (in a custom database, 3rd party enterprise application server, file share, mainframe, etc.). Custom code may have to be written to facilitate bringing this content over to FAST so that it can be indexed. Knowing this a comprehensive analysis project must be completed to understand all the content/data that is spread across the organization. A common mistake is a company may index bad data and they get the old "garbage in; garbage out" issues. There must be plans for indexing both good and bad data, formatting unstructured data, making data relevant, normalizing data (removing duplicates), etc. We will need to understand the entire life-cycle of that data and how it can be effectively pulled or pushed into the FAST Search index. This is very similar to a data warehouse project however the context is a little different.

An Enterprise Search project is also very similar to a complex ETL project because you will have to create several transformation processes/workflows. The processes must transform the content into a document that can be recognized by the FAST Index. FAST refers to anything in the index as a document; even if the index item comes from a database. A document for FAST is a unique piece of data with metadata which gives it relevancy. FAST provides several out of the box connectors that do this transformation and they provide an API to write custom ones. In many cases you may have to build or extend connectors. Just as important as the ETL pre-processing, there is post-processing routines that must be executed before the search results are passed back to the user interface layer. Again more relevancy rules or aggregation of search results may be incorporated here. I was happy to hear that the FAST team also draws comparisons to an ETL project when discussing what an Enterprise Search project is.

User Interface

Most Enterprise Search platforms like FAST do not have a traditional GUI; it is an Enterprise Search engine that can be plugged into new or existing platforms. FAST does provide several controls that can be integrated into any UI platform but in many cases you will be extending upon or building complete new controls. FAST provides a rich API that is accessible in such languages and .NET, Java and C++.

User Profile

An important element of the FAST Enterprise Search project is to understand the user profile that is performing the search. Things such as their current location, where they are within the organization, what sort of specialties do they have, what types of past searches have they done, who have they worked for work for, and past or future projects, tasks or initiatives they have supported can all be used to give a more relevant search result. This requires integration to go to systems that can infer these relationships and pass this information along with the query to FAST Query and Results server which will return a relevant result.

Security

The profile is also important for incorporating security. FAST has numerous ways in which documents can be securely exposed to the end user. For instance there is an Access Control List (ACL) which is part of the document instance in the search index. The ACL is populated during the indexing of content and this may require customizations to set the ACL appropriately. As well, more customizations may be added to do real-time authorization to ensure that documents being returned from the index have not been removed from the user's visibility. Another consideration is to partition indexes based on boundaries such as internet, extranet and intranet. There are several more considerations that must be accounted for so time must be accounted for in the plan to ensure that content is managed properly.

Installation and Configuration

A major portion of the project plan needs to be devoted to the installation and configuration of the FAST server. There are several important things that need to be accounted for when doing this. For instance how many queries will be executed concurrently, what are peak usage scenarios, how much content will be indexed, what sort of complexities/exceptions are there in the indexing process, what is the anticipated growth, etc. All of this must be known for us to properly scale the FAST server and the design of custom components.

Testing

With all of the custom transformation and GUI components to support the Enterprise Search implementation, there will need to be a focus on system integration testing, system application testing, and user acceptance testing. There will be specific test for search to ensure that indexing, query performance and result relevancy are accurate and within acceptable ranges. This is nothing new but we need to be sure that a proportionate amount of time is incorporated into the plan to ensure that a quality solution is put in place.

Sustainment and Governance

Sustainment next needs to be part of the plan which is commonly neglected. Too often the plan is focused on the short-term end result while the long-term management is not incorporated into the solution. What sort of organizational management changes are required to support and maintenance of the search implementation? What sort of configuration management business processes will need to be introduced to continually tune the index and relevancy model based on usage? What sort of new roles and responsibilities need to be incorporated into the employee performance (from both a systems and business user perspective)? How is the enterprise taxonomy going to be maintained? What sort key performance metrics and reporting are needed to consistently evaluate the success of the project? What is the process for incorporating change back in the solution (which is extremely important for Enterprise Search)? If questions like these are not incorporated into the early design of the project, there will be long-term challenges with the adoption and integration of the Enterprise Search investment.

Closing

As you can see the key to a successful Enterprise Search project is to understand the needs of the business and how the solution will be supported. Many of the tasks that were discussed are very standard; we just needed to put them in context.

The first thing that many will ask before beginning a major Enterprise Search initiative with a product like FAST is why is an Enterprise Search important? Secondly, what is an Enterprise Search project? My approach is to not understand these questions this from a sales perspective but from a technology management and consultant perspective.

Why is Enterprise Search important?

Users have to work mass amounts of data that is either stored internally or externally. Search can mean lots of things to different industries however the goal is simple; it is to display the right information to the right person at the right time without distraction. At the same time we must have a flexible and configurable search platform that will surface the most relevant information to the business user from where it is stored.

Information Workers have to search and then utilize data. How do they do this? They typically have to log into an application and perform a search. Or when they enter an application, there may be some data contextually rolled up to them based upon who they are. There is a demand by business users to make search easier. We have heard many times "how can I search my enterprise data in the same way I Google something on the internet". Users want the ability to go to a single place, run a search query and receive results from across the entire enterprise. This is very different than performing a public internet search or a search function contained within the scope of a single application. Public internet searching has its own complexities however it typically is indexing content on websites. Enterprise Search becomes complex because the data being indexed can come in numerous formats (document file, database, mainframe, etc). From the user perspective this complexity must be transparent. They must be given a single result set that will allow them to research problem, complete task or even initiate a business process.

Organizations are challenged with providing comprehensive search solutions that can access content no matter where the data resides. Public search engines have as well created demand to provide highly relevant search experiences. Relevancy is the key to success for a search solution. To have accurate relevancy it is important to know as much as we can about the user entering the query. Profile relevancy can be determined a by numbers of things. For example where the person is located, what is their job function, and what past searches have they or colleagues done. Relevancy can also be determined by the attributes associated to a piece of content. For example is the author considered to be trusted, is the content itself fresh, or even is content highly recommended by other users. The search platform must have an adaptive relevancy model. It must be able to change based on business demands and subsequently learn how to provide better results utilizing factors that are incorporated into the relevancy model. An Enterprise Search platform like FAST can provide this advanced capability.

The vision of going to a single place find data is not really a new concept. We have seen a major push for data warehouses to create a single location to facilitate enterprise reporting. We have seen enterprise portals created which give users a single user interface that provides contextual data from disparate systems. We have seen SOA trying to consolidate business services and now we are seeing cloud services gaining traction in the market. The reality is that the enterprise architecture on the large will be disparate. Companies have made significant investments into many technologies at one time or another and consolidating them to a single platform is not always realistic. This is why we are constantly trying to find new solutions to work with data in a uniform manner. This is an important justification for an Enterprise Search solution such as FAST.

To restate, the goal is to have an Enterprise Search platform that can create single result set using disparate data from across the enterprise. Where a lot of organizations fall short is they do not have the tools to navigate this data. Business users are required to have deep domain knowledge of the organization, format of the data, and business processes. The domain expert must know what is good or bad based upon experience which is not transferrable making continuity of operations challenging. This is yet another reason why an Enterprise Search platform provides significant value to an organization.

Here are some examples of how organizations have used Enterprise Search.

Several major ecommerce sites like Best Buy and Autotrader.com used FAST to better advertise to its customers, expose product significantly quicker to the customer, provide better navigation of search results and provide integration with OEM partners.

A business data brokerage firm was able to provide more relevant results, increase user satisfaction, provide data from multiple disparate locations, create better customer retention, created collaborative data rating system and allowed for communication between subject matter experts.

A community facilitator for the natural resource industry was able to create a B2B solution that provided dynamic drill/navigation of industry data, created automate extraction policies to mine for important data, was able to regionalize their search results, created a pay model for more high-end results, and improved their sales model by using relevancy.

A major computer production company used FAST to improve economies of scale for support personnel. They significantly lowered call-center cost by directing users to search first, provided customers with more up to date support information and allowed their worldwide staff of engineers to user their native languages when performing a search.

A global law firm used FAST to create a knowledge management solution that allowed them to reduce research personnel and created consolidated search experience. They significantly reduce ramp-up time of new lawyers, greatly improved relevant results with advanced content navigation, and provided better communication of best practices.

A law enforcement agency was able allow investigators to electronically research mass amounts of data across the government which they normally did not have access to. This subsequently increased productivity, shortened lengths of investigations and help them comply with government regulations.

Another government agency created a solution using FAST which would search public domain for information of persons who are potentially breaking laws and initiate business processes bring them to justice.

All these examples provide strong justifications for the value of an Enterprise Search solution. With FAST costs were reduced, they were able to meet regulations, they performed more efficiently, and generated more revenue for goods and services.

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About Me

I currently work for Office 365 as a Principle PM on the Office 365 Gov cloud team. I spent my first 7 years at Microsoft as an Office 365 technical specialist leading sales efforts with US Federal. Prior to Microsoft I worked for a Microsoft Gold partner called RDA as a Project Manager. Prior to that, I was a software engineer working with Big 4 management consulting firms. Over the past years I have done a lot of work with Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Silverlight, K2, BizTalk, InfoPath, ASP.net, etc. I have written a Wrox book about SharePoint BPA technologies and one of the solutions was a finalist at Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year conference. I am a Virginia Tech alumnus completing both my undergrad and masters in Information Technology. I play ice hockey and lacrosse on a regular basis and I am huge Washington Capitals fan.